


C12H22O11

by aderyn



Series: Natural Facts [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Gen, it's not in the sugar, references to THoB
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-22
Updated: 2012-03-22
Packaged: 2017-11-02 09:09:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/367337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sweetness doesn’t drive the engine. </p>
<p>(John takes his coffee black.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	C12H22O11

**Author's Note:**

> "Crystal dissolution may include three component processes: interface reaction, diffusion, and complications due to convection” –Zhang, Walker & Lesher, “Diffusive Crystal Dissolution”

****_“Tea is meant to be bitter”—George Orwell_

 

Brilliance has an edge of bitterness.  No matter how good it is (the tea, the high, the case), it won’t last.  So even if you’re on fire (the carbon left behind), it’ll still be over soon, gone, the fix dissolved into the pale solution, into the dull collapse of shock and sleep.

***

As a child, he learnt sweetness, because he could, although he wasn’t. (How adults will fall, hard, for a shy foal, all legs and fore-mane, nicking cubes from their pockets, blinking, breath electric, poised to bolt.)

It doesn’t matter it’s an act. He learned it well and later, once, when for the first time John put him to bed as though he were a child, he thought about it, didn’t bolt.

***

It's not in the sugar. 

(It’s in the fear, the trembling, the draped cage, the collapse in John’s eyes.)

He can be wrong.

It's in the nature of the crystal to repent.

 ***

Coffee shop, 3 am, case closed.  Light crackling on the counter’s edge.

Hands in the sugar, teardrop of a waitress, winking,

“Don’t be stingy with your sugar, darling.”

John’s eyeroll off his blank look. ( _You get all the action, darling_.)

Sherlock, (two sugars), ( _Yes, I do_.)

The solution is elegy to the problem.  Nothing lasts.

But this: John takes his coffee black.

 


End file.
